Recently Published Reviews

This slim volume provides a valuable contribution to the study of the art of the fourteenth century. Beth Williamson presents the iconographic theme of the Madonna of Humility and offers “both a new methodology and a new meaning of the image itself” (11). Whereas art historians frequently set out to revise a disciplinary narrative or adjust a category or genre by giving prominence to a neglected work or assigning importance to the role of such an object in re-contouring the establishment of the motif, Williamson sets a more ambitious task for herself by proposing to re-evaluate the composition of the… Full Review

Natalie Adamson’s Painting, Politics and the Struggle for the École de Paris, 1944–1964 provides a thoroughly researched account of postwar debates about the School of Paris. It describes the various redefinitions of the school after World War II as inconsistent and directly conflicting, such that the school exists largely as a set of competing discourses, a discursive “complex” in Adamson’s description (3). In the late 1940s, artistic discourse was strongly divided as Communist painters like André Fougeron and critics like Louis Aragon and Jean Marcenac launched New Realism in defense of figurative painting as part of a French humanist tradition… Full Review

Anyone living in the West who has ever attended a performance of Chinese Beijing opera will immediately notice that the actors wear elaborate headdresses above their brightly painted faces and that rich costumes clothe their bodies on a stark stage with few props. While listening to thus attired actors sing unfamiliar tunes accompanied by Asian instruments, the audience will follow with its gaze their exaggerated body movement and stylized hand gestures. Without question, the costumes present the most accessible information about the characters and the unfolding drama. But that doesn’t make them any more understandable. Alexandra Bond’s Beijing Opera… Full Review

The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University is, quite appropriately, a mix. And, like any good mix, the exhibition includes perennial hits, lesser-known works by familiar artists, and more than a few unknown gems. Drawing upon vinyl records as “metaphor, archive, icon, portrait or transcendent medium” (as described in a wall text), the exhibition offers a wide-ranging view of how this single object has remained a catalyst for visual artists over the past forty-five years and, as all exhibitions should seek to do, merges a rigorous curatorial program with an almost guilt-inducing… Full Review

John M. MacKenzie’s Museums and Empire: Natural History, Human Cultures and Colonial Identities is a hugely detailed exploration of colonial museums that narrates their establishment during the nineteenth century in Canada, South Africa, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, while at the same time interrogating their purposes in communicating the messages and global reach of the power of the British Empire. The book also points to the changes in political influence and organization that the museum institution reflected and was subject to during the shift and ultimate demise of British colonial power that stretched into the twentieth century. MacKenzie’s… Full Review

Pat Steir is perhaps best known for her large-scale paintings of waves and waterfalls, but a recent exhibition at the Rhode Island School of Design focused solely on Steir’s drawings. Organized by Jan Howard, Curator of Prints, Drawings and Photographs at the Museum, and Susan Harris, an independent curator, the exhibition reveals Steir’s abiding interest in the nature of line in both drawing and writing. Drawing and writing are each symbol systems based on line from which the viewer, bringing layers of references to bear, constructs meaning. Steir’s perception that writing and drawing are essentially the same enterprise remains the… Full Review

The Social Work of Museums offers exactly what the title implies: a comprehensive survey of museums as a social work context. Lois Silverman, who is trained as both a social worker and museum scholar, undertook this work because, “it is long past time for museums to survey, organize, and integrate systematically from a theoretically grounded social work perspective the growing body of museum knowledge and practice currently scattered around the globe” (39). The result is no dry encyclopedia but a sympathetic call to action. Silverman artfully weaves together a number of seemingly disparate threads: international case studies of practice, including… Full Review

In 2005 the National Museum of Cambodia opened its metal conservation laboratory after having received training and support from experts at the Freer and Sackler galleries of the Smithsonian Institution and the Getty Conservation Institute. That laboratory was the first of its kind to be built in Cambodia after the devastation of the preceding decades and has trained a generation of specialists in the treatment and preservation of ancient metalwork. For the past five years the conservation laboratory has been fulfilling its mission of maintaining the cultural legacy of the Cambodian people, and this exhibition originated as a way to… Full Review

Few readers, I imagine, were surprised to discover that Yvonne Rainer’s stunning 2006 memoir, Feelings Are Facts: A Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press)—a sprawling book intertwining the artist’s early personal and artistic developments, rendering them inseparable—would conclude with an epilogue. Such a coda typically affords authors an opportunity to wrap up their ideas and cast a retrospective gaze over the whole of a book once its myriad elements have settled into shape. Rainer’s conclusion would seem only to follow protocol, in a sense. And yet this particular postscript, like so much of her production, effectively displaces expectations around such conventions… Full Review

From the time of its invention, photography has caused trouble for art. Now, in a belated stroke of reciprocity, art is causing trouble for photography. Early signs included photography’s absorption into museum collections and its embrace by the art market. Then came art historians, fueled by the writings of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes, arguing that photography had eclipsed painting and sculpture to become art’s medium ne plus ultra. One of the most recent and influential contributions to this line of argument, Michael Fried’s Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008) (click… Full Review

Widely celebrated in the United States during the 1950s, Italian artist Alberto Burri (1915–1995) was subsequently forgotten. Forgotten by U.S. institutions, at least, as the nation solidified its claim as the cultural center in the era of Pop. Not so in Italy, where his place in the twentieth century as a key, postwar artist is now firmly established. In Rome, there is no shortage of catalogues to consult and exhibitions to visit. But in Los Angeles (or in English), many have never heard of him. Combustione: Alberto Burri and America, at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, sought to… Full Review

To begin with, I confess that I have some difficulties accommodating myself to wide art-historical surveys such as Alessia Trivellone’s L’Hérétique imaginé, which covers a span of six centuries with the aim of tracing a coherent development of a sole subject, the heretic. I am not stating that my skepticism will diminish if the survey is chronologically narrower or comprehending more subjects; the point is, rather, that I find serious problems with every sort of “coherent development.” The division of the volume into four sections corresponds more or less with what Trivellone maintains to be a coherent… Full Review

These two books, which describe how painters made a living in seventeenth-century Rome, Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Naples, synthesize the work of many dedicated scholars, including some by the authors themselves. As Patrizia Cavazzini notes in her introduction, most research on Italian painting has favored major painters and their patrons, neglecting the large supporting cast who also made a living as painters and decorators in Rome and elsewhere. Some worked assisting painters charged with covering extensive wall surfaces with religious or mythological scenes, providing illusionistic architectural frameworks [quadratura], or adding generic landscape vistas or patches of al antica… Full Review

Patricia G. Berman’s In Another Light: Danish Painting in the Nineteenth Century is a beautiful book about an area of nineteenth-century art that is little known outside of Denmark. Although Robert Rosenblum and Kirk Varnedoe laid the groundwork for understanding the work in a larger European context, the scholarship and publications in English have been modest. Berman rectifies this situation with her well-illustrated and comprehensive book. In Another Light offers an overview of a range of discourses in Danish art, which Berman analyzes as she locates the works in their broader socio-cultural context. When applicable, Berman brings in examples of… Full Review

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb “emerge” as: “to come forth into view . . . from an enclosed space.” This definition has implications for the study of landscapes, especially those of the productive English countryside. Tidy patchwork fields and hedgerows have come to be regarded as quintessentially—and innately—English. However, what is not necessarily part of this perception (even though it has long been studied by historians, geographers, and archaeologists) is how such a renowned topography quite literally emerged from systematic enclosures over the past few hundred years. In other words, the English landscape as it is perceived today… Full Review